The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry - true by Housman's practical test [i.e. it makes the hairs of one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving] - celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story [the Theme], and the three main characters are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occasion of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoic visions and delusions. The weird, or rival, often appears in nightmare as the tall, lean, dark-faced bed-side spectre, or Prince of the Air, who tries to drag the dreamer out through the window, so that he looks back and sees his body still lying rigid in bed; but he takes countless other malevolent or diabolic or serpent-like forms ...

It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year, he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apollonian or Jehovistic cult.

Man is demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a demi-goddess - she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn or hate.

Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man's dependence on her for life. She is passionately interested in grown men, however, because the love-hate that Osiris and Set feel for each other on her account is a tribute to her divinity. She tries to satisfy both, but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to regard this as evidence of her fundamental falsity, not of his own irreconsolable demands on her. (The White Goddess)

Manuscript E:

On the twenty-fifth day of the first month (Vaitu Nui), Ira and Makoi set sail; on the first day of June ('Maro'), the bow of Ira's canoe appeared on the distant horizon, came closer and closer on its course, and sailed along, and finally (one) could see the (new home) land.

New land approaches when the canoe of Ira has reached June 1. Ahead lies midwinter and at that time the land will rise above the 'horizon of time'. Sticks with maro feathers indicate a limit for the Sun King, but maro is also the loincloth (or belt), which Maui had to let go of when fishing up new land:

The fish came near the surface then, so that Maui's line was slack for a moment, and he shouted to it not to get tangled. But then the fish plunged down again, all the way to the bottom. And Maui had to strain, and haul away again. And at the height of all this excitement his belt worked loose, and his maro fell off and he had to kick it from his feet. He had to do the rest with nothing on ...